AWB - white priority

mannetti21 wrote in post #19353895
So then, the question becomes which image best represents the actual scene, and do you actually want the most accurate representation rather than what may look more pleasing to the eye? All I can say is, thank God for RAW.

Interestingly, what does "accurate" really mean?

Take different people into a scene and they are going to see colors all a bit differently. Take a picture and try to adjust the camera as best as you can to get as close to a real representation, and those results are going to be seen differently as well.

I go for what is pleasing in an image, rather than what is a technically accurate representation myself. That might mean changing the temperature just a bit after the fact to warm the scene up, or maybe it was too warm, and I want to chill it a bit. It is the difference between art and just technical capture of a scene I guess. Each situation and end result may benefit from one or the other, case by case.

And yes, always keep the raw around, so you can go back and do something completely different the next time you want to take an old image and reprocess it.

I copied Photo 2 (the 'warm' one produced by AWB, not AWB-W) from Post 5 in this thread. I read it into Lightroom, then I made a Virtual Copy of that photo and edited the Copy. Here is side-by-side comparison of the two.

duckster wrote in post #19353903
After looking at both images, the AWB with white priority captures this particular gym better. This gym has a lot of golden oak colored wood, between the bleachers and the flooring and photos tend to have a yellow cast, at least to my eyes

To my eyes the first might be more accurate but the girls' skin colours especially look awful. The second, a lot warmer, looks much more pleasing.

That does look better. The color of the wall behind the bleachers is much better to what it actually looks like. I always like other opinions as I am a bit color blind so never know if I am seeing things "correctly"

Pippan wrote in post #19353999
To my eyes the first might be more accurate but the girls' skin colours especially look awful. The second, a lot warmer, looks much more pleasing.

Thanks for that observation. Good point.

duckster wrote in post #19354000
That does look better. The color of the wall behind the bleachers is much better to what it actually looks like. I always like other opinions as I am a bit color blind so never know if I am seeing things "correctly"

As I have already stated, the AWB and AWB-W settings are simplistically determined, and the change between them is an adjustment of about 300K in the cooler final result...that simplistic determination ends up missing the 'right' color balance using either setting! Particularly in the quite varied lighting environment of most gynasiums.
The best way to set WB is to photograph a known neutral white or gray object, set Custom WB by that photo and shoot the rest of the shots in that venue with the value set within Custom WB. User Manual tells you how to do that.

Here I copied Photo 1 from Post 5, and repeated the process of creating Virtual Copy in LR, using eyedropper to set WB, photo 1 in the pair below is original Post 5, photo 2 in the pair below has WB set via LR eyedropper.

I need to practice that. I have not done it before.